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Since the introduction of the iPad, Joe Zeff Design has shown people what's possible.

We collaborated with Touch Press to design Solar System for iPad, an app in the iTunes Hall of Fame. We launched Fast Company on the iPad and National Geographic on the iPhone, both award-winning magazine apps. And then we designed and developed tablet applications for a new generation of publishers — universities, corporations, museums, institutions — as the iPad transitioned from a toy to a tool.

The next frontier for phones and tablets is the workplace. And to seize that opportunity, I'm closing the studio I founded 14 years ago and joining ScrollMotion as its Vice President/Executive Creative Director.

Adobe shines its spotlight on Joe Zeff Design today, promoting a series of higher education events featuring company president Joe Zeff, an Adobe TV episode about the studio, and an extended post on its digital publishing blog about how JZD is rethinking how universities interact with students, faculty and alumni.

Joe will partner with Adobe's higher education team to help universities better understand their potential to be transformative through Digital Publishing Suite. He will draw on the studio's experience in developing apps for UCLA Anderson School of Management, the University of Notre Dame and Maryland Institute College of Art. The event in Baltimore is scheduled for July 23, and registration is required.

Meanwhile, Adobe showcases Joe Zeff Design in a two-minute film on Adobe TV titled Everybody Has A Story, taking viewers behind the scenes at our church-turned-studio in Montclair, NJ, as JZD closes an issue of Fast Company for iPad. Joe talks about the benefits of Digital Publishing Suite and how it helps the studio focus on storytelling without the constraints of complicated code.

Joe Zeff Design and its clients will be showcased during several Adobe events over the next two weeks that we're excited to announce.

President Joe Zeff will present at Adobe MAX in Los Angeles on Monday, May 6 in a session focused on studios that are pushing the boundaries of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) to provide solutions for non-publishers. Register for Adobe MAX here and sign up for our session here — registration is limited, and we can only fit so many bobbleheads in our luggage, so sign up today!

The following week, some of our clients will present apps that we've helped to create at the Adobe Digital Publishing Summit May 14-15 in New York City. The first day is focused on traditional publishing, with Declan Moore from National Geographic and Lynda Hammes from Foreign Affairs on stage. The following day addresses corporate publishing, with Johanna Cap from JPMorgan Chase and Tim O'Connor from Notre Dame presenting apps.

Register for the May 14 event here, and the May 15 event here. We'll be attending both days; reach out if you'd like to schedule a meeting.

Joe Zeff Design is proud to present its latest iPad app, a collaboration with the Maryland Institute College of Art that demonstrates the power of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite when placed in the hands of students without traditional publishing backgrounds.

"The Mutant Library" showcases the work of 14 graduate students in MICA's Graphic Design program. Krissi Xenakis, an art director at Joe Zeff Design who received her MFA in Graphic Design from the school, returned to her alma mater for a weekend in March to present a workshop on digital publishing. After she returned to work Monday and showed her colleagues what the students had done, we immediately reached out to the university to find a way to share with the entire design community.

You've seen panoramic photography on real estate websites, Google Street View, and your own iPhone. Now it's coming to your iPad, infused with hotspots, audio, video, 3D renderings and other media that make the best storytelling device ever made even more effective.

Our new iPad app, an interactive tour of our church-turned-studio called The People in the Steeple,showcases panoramic photography as a way to deliver content that lets users experience it rather than simply reading and looking. We developed the app using a combination of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite and custom HTML programming. It's free, and available here.

Don't get us wrong, New York magazine for iPad is quite good. It is well-designed, with lots and lots of extras: audio clips, video clips, and layers of content. The print content has been thoughtfully redesigned for the tablet edition, which runs on the Mag+ platform. Not only is the editorial content enhanced, so is the advertising: a Macy's ad comes to life on the screen with autoplaying video, drag-and-drop outfits, and shortcuts to the online store. All in all, New York Media and The Wonderfactory did a terrific job.

The New York Times' prototype of its redesigned website raises fundamental questions about the merits of distributing content through websites versus apps. If you haven't yet seen the demo, it's available here. ​

The new website looks like a tablet app, functions like a tablet app, but isn't a tablet app — it's an HTML-based site available to any viewer on any device without downloading anything at all from any app store. For The New York Times, there's no need to submit anything to Apple or anyone else for approval, and no need to share revenues with Apple or anyone else. So far, so good.

Neither experiment worked as well as tablets as they did on desktops, but it's a matter of time before they do. ​So why bother creating tablet apps using platforms like Adobe Digital Publishing Suite when websites can be so ​tablet-friendly? We'd argue that these are the reasons why:

The Final Hours of Tomb Raider is available starting today for iPad, Kindle Fire and desktop computers, setting a new standard for how storytelling comes to life in a tablet application.

Once again we've collaborated with journalist Geoff Keighley to tell the story behind a blockbuster video game, in this case Tomb Raider, which launches today with versions for Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Windows computers. Our app immediately caught the attention of Entertainment Weekly, which featured it on its website yesterday and said that it was "beautifully designed."

Joe Zeff Design is excited to announce that Volumes 1 through 5 of Kids Discover are now available in the iTunes App Store, packed with interactivity that makes science and social studies fun for children of all ages.

The newest releases are standalone apps about Galaxies, Antarctica, Washington, D.C., Cells and Extreme Weather. Galaxies is available free; the others are $2.99. And we're hard at work on more volumes, each designed and developed using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to combine text, photos, video, animations, interactive 3D models, quizzes and activities into one seamless multimedia experience.

Congratulations to filmmaker Dawn Porter and her team at Trilogy Films for their exciting premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where Gideon's Army has opened to standing ovations and rave reviews.

Gideon's Army is a documentary about the challenges facing public defenders 50 years after the landmark Supreme Court decision Gideon v. Wainwright, which
requires courts to provide counsel for defendants unable to pay for
their own attorneys. Porter sheds light on an overburdened system, with
15,000 public defenders handling a million cases a year.

We've had the good fortune of working with the University of Notre Dame and Adobe on Notre Dame Gameday, an impromptu digital magazine for iPad built around the BCS National Championship game played last night in Miami.

While
Notre Dame's season ended abruptly last night, the
conversation about interactive gameday programs for major universities
is just getting started. We've been contacted by a slew of universities
about developing similar products, both as one-off publications and
weekly editions. It may be that the next revolution in digital
publishing takes hold in college athletics departments nationwide.

Joe Zeff Design is excited to announce that Notre Dame Gameday, an interactive gameday program for the BCS National Championship Game we developed for the University of Notre Dame, is now available in the iTunes App Store.

Notre Dame Gameday takes fans behind the scenes with the No. 1-ranked Notre Dame Fighting Irish, recounting the highlights of their climb to the top of the BCS rankings and previewing their January 7 matchup against No. 2 Alabama, the defending national champions. The free iPad app features game-by-game recaps of the team's 12-0 season, photo and video galleries, statistical analyses, interactive rosters, animated lineups, stadium diagrams — even a virtual tailgate party.

We designed and developed the app in less than two weeks using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. Instead of reformatting a print edition, we created an experience exclusively for iPad. The rosters are sortable to display players by name, number or position. The starting lineups are depicted as 3D-rendered characters that animate into place. There are video highlights from every game this season, taking fans inside the locker room and onto the gridiron with the Irish.

The death of The Daily has called into question the
viability of iPad apps as a way to deliver magazine content. "Tablets in
general, and the iPad in particular, are actually much less powerful
and revolutionary than many of us had hoped," writes Felix Salmon of Reuters. "Turds all around," adds MG Siegler of TechCrunch.

Joe Zeff Design is excited to announce that its most ambitious iPad app yet, Kids Discover, is available today in the iTunes App Store.

We've developed an interactive magazine for children that blows the doors off the competition. Kids Discover is a monthly iPad app bursting at the seams with original content — text, animation, pictures and activities. The app teaches kids about a different subject every month, with new installments sold individually or by subscription. There is no advertising whatsoever, ensuring that parents and children can experience Kids Discover without distractions.

Joe Zeff Design is excited to announce that Assets Digital, an iPad app we developed for UCLA Anderson School of Management, is now available for download in the iTunes App Store.

The app represents an exciting new way for one of the country's top business schools to engage with its alumni. Traditionally, universities have published alumni magazines that were distributed by mail to a list of graduates. Assets Digital changes the game by reaching beyond that list of 36,000 alumni to access current students, prospective students, faculty, media and anyone interested in business, culture and technology, anywhere in the world — a potential audience of 85 million iPad users.

It's been a harrowing week for the New York City region, for certain. Most people have no electricity or heat. There are mile-long queues at gasoline stations. Supplies are increasingly scarce. But there is some good news, a glimmer of hope for those at Joe Zeff Design, app developers and publishers everywhere.

The iPad Mini. It makes magazines smaller. And their potential audiences bigger.

The iPad mini isn't the only small screen making big news this week. We're excited to announce that National Geographic for iPhone is now available in the App Store, where it is promoted on the iTunes home page as a New and Noteworthy app. Yes, National Geographic for iPhone.

An iPad mini that is fully compatible with all 275,000 iPad apps in the App Store poses a challenge for designers and developers. Until today, an iPad-only strategy allowed publishers to target a single device, the original iPad. Now they're suddenly confronted with the need to deliver that same content on a smaller model as well. There doesn't appear to be an option to restrict content to one device or another. Apps work interchangeably on both models, squeezing 1,024 x 768 pixels into a 7.9-inch display and stretching those very same pixels across a significantly larger 9.7-inch display.

Today's expected announcement of a smaller iPad is a very big deal. Here's why: Unlike the original iPad, it's truly mobile. The iPad Mini, or Air, or whatever Apple chooses to call it has the potential to replace its big brother as a daily companion for e-mail, texting and browsing. It nicely splits the difference between a phone and a laptop, enough so to justify its weight in a briefcase or purse. The original iPad has been forced into makeshift roles as a laptop or camera, when in fact it is neither. For a 10-inch tablet, there's no place like home, in the living room or bedroom.

It is with tremendous regret that we at Joe Zeff Design mourn the passing of our beloved friend, Newsweek, which has died at the age of 79.

This studio created dozens of illustrations for Newsweek through the years, working with such talents as Lynn Staley, Amid Capeci, Jon Meacham, Karl Gude and countless others. During the mid-1990s, Joe Zeff Design and Newsweek were situated across Broadway from one another, so close that Joe and Covers Director Bruce Ramsay could practically communicate with one another by yelling out the window across Columbus Circle. After leaving TIME in 2000, Joe and Newsweek became fast friends, which yielded many memorable covers and collaborations.